Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HDR is BROKEN on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra!”.
Hey so uh a couple weeks ago, I joined the team here at Android authority and, as we were sort of ironing out what a good kind of video would be for me to make for Android authority. I was sent a couple of phones to explore, amongst them um the s24 ultra and I was pretty excited because you know it’s the latest and greatest from Samsung, and the display looks incredible, but within the first couple of hours with the display. Specifically, I noticed a behavior, that’s let me down a pretty interesting rabbit hole at this point. We’Ve all heard of HDR in one shape or another, and when it comes to displays, it really is, in my opinion, the tech that has the biggest impact in the final image. These days, most movies and TV shows are available in some form of HDR and if I’m given the choice between SDR and HDR for a specific piece of content, 99 times out of 100, I’m probably going to pick the h, HDR presentation. The idea is to give the Creator the control over your displays, luminance that can be used for some creative flare. Imagine an explosion that just happens on screen and you kind of want to make it as impactful and bright as possible to contrast with a night scene. Then the Creator can actually say to the TV hey when this happens just blast as much brightness as you can do, and the TV plays accordingly, or at least it should play accordingly when, when it works, it really is transformative. It can have a massive impact on the image contrast and make it sort of feel sort of lifelike and pop from the display, but within a couple of hours, with the s24 ultra, I was pretty quick to sort of find out that the display was not actually Looking that incredible, when I was showing my usual HDR movies at first, I thought it was something to do with the actual movie file.
So I went onto YouTube and found some HDR videos and tested with those, but I was still not impressed in SDR. Everything looked as I would expect, but when it comes to HDR the image looked sort of dimmed and the highlights weren’t, even that bright and overall it just looked muted and dull. So I compared it with a pixel 8 and iPhone 15 Pro, and lo and behold, the s24 ultra showed consistently lower Peak brightness numbers than both of these devices substantially lower. In fact, nearly 40 % less brightness than the iPhone when displaying a peak white covering 50 % of the screen. Just to give you an idea even compared to an old iPhone 11 Pro Max a device that claims only 1,200 nits of peak brightness. To my eye, the s24 still look dimmer and less contrasty when showing real world content, and I thought this doesn’t really make a lot of sense. So I doubl down and retested things. I went into the settings to enable the high brightness mode and made sure to test it with and without adaptive brightness. I also test it in Vivid mode mode and natural mode, but nothing seemed to have an impact I made sure to test content. That was both in hdr1 and HDR 10, plus just to make sure it wasn’t something to do with the dynamic metadata of HDR, 10 plus, but nothing really seemed to make an impact.
That was until I started to play around with my ambient light brightness and then the issue was, you know clear clear as day. Basically, if you’re watching HDR content and you’re indoors, with only indirect light, Samsung will choose to lower the display’s brightness, no matter what settings you have on this not only creates images that lack the sparkling highlights that ol ads are so good at reproducing, but it also Makes the darker parts of the image darker than they should be? You really get the idea that they’re turning the brightness down across the entire brightness range and not just capping out the max value, which in itself would still be a mistake. The entire point of HDR is to control the contrast as much as possible, so screens should not interfere with what the Creator intended for the contrast, r issue of a particular scene unless we’re talking about boosting brightness for accessibility reasons.
But I mean if you’re, watching a movie or a TV show outside in direct bright light. I guess it’s better to see a boosted image than I guess no image at all, but I only see that as some sort of accessibility feature and not something that should be used in most viewing scenarios, you can see the displays brightness rais in clear steps, as I increase the brightness of the room, even though adaptive brightness is off and should not interfere with brightness in such a drastic way. When displaying HDR content, you can also see that the screen is Shifting color slightly making subtler Blues into more vibrant and intense Hues.
Making me feel like they’re kind of trying to trick my eyeballs into preferring it at the detriment of accuracy and respecting the original picture. But why should you care? I mean at this point: phone manufacturers are claiming Sky High, Peak brightness numbers, and when you see something like that and you think about watching a movie, it will be incredible to watch a movie with a screen that can achieve a peak brightness of 2500 nits, 3,000 And some of them even upwards of 4,000 nits of peak brightness, but in reality you can never reach these numbers with real world content. You just simply can’t the only way you’re achieving these is when you are in complete and direct sunlight. But even then you know, the contrast is completely ruined, the Shadows are all boosted and it should only really be seen as sort of an accessibility thing that I feel like is being blown out of proportion these days comparable to how megapixel races were in the past. With ever increasing numbers until the point where people were just like – I don’t know, I just don’t care about it anymore, but with screens it could really have a meaningful impact in an HDR presentation, if only it was done properly. We’Ve reached out to Samsung for some comments just to see if they are willing to explain why they do such a behavior and they still haven’t replied, but when they do I’ll leave it as a top pinned comment down below, so that you guys know the true Answer: hey, I’m editing Carlos coming in uh, quite sick, as you might be able to tell but Samsung replied, and I thought I could wrap up the video with their take on this whole thing.
Before I go back to the original video, where I let you know exactly what I think about this whole thing, basically Samsung said adaptive brightness drives display adjustments based on ambient light level, Samsung Galaxy devices process HDR videos to adjust the luminance of the display adaptively based On not only current brightness, but also viewing conditions, this is to provide enhanced visibility and a more immersive viewing experience to users best showcasing the high dynamic range of HDR video assets. So there you go it’s a bit of a PR answer, but um that’s what they had to say back to the healthier me on the main video. In my opinion, I feel like they probably kind of try to do this in a way to have the picture. Always look more and more bright, at the detriment of dim light for some reason, which I don’t quite understand, but at the same time it just it it. It completely destroys the purpose, and I feel like with the vast amount of settings that they have available on their settings panel. They could just add a filmmaker mode or something along those lines that stops the display doing trickery when it comes to ambient light and just gives you actual control over the final image, like you probably should from the beginning, beginning and like I can do on my Iphone and pixel, and probably on many other devices, every Samsung device that we’ve tried.
We’Ve tried the regular s24 and the s23 ultra. They all behaved very similarly, and you can always see the stepping up in brightness with the increase in ambient light, which can be quite distracting if you are on public transport and you go in a tunnel and out of a tunnel – and you know just messing up With ambient light, it’s not even as smooth as the default sort of auto brightness that sort of scales it in a much more pleasant way. It’S quite abrupt and um yeah. I just don’t feel like this – should really be a thing, but yeah uh.
That was my first video for Android authority. Hope you guys enjoyed it and um yeah I’ll see you very soon. Bye, .